


How the day sounds

by Snorpenbass



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/M, Friendship, Mystery, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 12:46:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3209702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snorpenbass/pseuds/Snorpenbass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Buffy went to Africa to sort out feelings and an epiphany, only to find her heart gone. But is he really..?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Not the damn princess

**Disclaimer:** Don't own BtVS, not challenging the copyright or trademark, leave me alone because I ain't got no money.

 **A/N:** This is the prequel to Spike's Horrible..., and a few of my thoughts on why Buffy/Angel and Buffy/Spike never quite worked for me. Note: this is a fic I originally posted on my LiveJournal account, and it is nowhere near finished. It might take a long time before the next chapter arrives.

-

 

_Once upon a time. That's how they all start, right? Once upon a time. And then there's a poor hapless princess who has to be saved by a prince and she adores him instantly and they live happily ever after. Sometimes the prince is cursed, and there's lots of drama, sometimes the prince is a beast, and again with the drama. Drama, drama, drama. Angst, crying, rape-attempts, murder-attempts, oh, and drama._

_It took me a long time to realize I wasn't the princess._

 

 

_**Undisclosed Location, Central Africa.** _

The sun was low in the sky when the small two-man plane touched down on the improvised runway. Buffy felt her joints creak as she opened the door and almost stumbled out, followed by her big backpack.

“You be careful now, yah? Blonde chickee like you be in a big bind in a place like dis, yah?” The pilot grinned at her, and Buffy once again resisted the urge to shove something metallic through his spine. Captain Octopus over there just didn't seem to _get_ that she was perfectly capable of snapping his finger bones like twigs.

“I'll be fine. Some friends are meeting me.”

He leered at her again. Damn it, why'd they have to have that stupid 'don't mutilate the normals' rule for anyway? “Y'sure nah?”

“Quite.”

He shrugged, slammed the door shut (it took a few tries to get it to close properly) and started up the engine again.

Once the plane was no more than a speck on the horizon, she turned around to the nearby bushes. “Okay, he's gone.”

The bushes shimmered and disappeared, revealing the Range Rover that had been hidden under the glamour. A tall, gorgeous black woman with short-cropped hair and huge earrings, looking like she stepped out of a hiker's fashion magazine exited the vehicle and nodded at her coolly. “Ms Summers?”

“Yeah.”

“Angelica Smythe-Nkwami.”

She held out her hand and Buffy shook it, taking care not to squeeze too hard.

There was an awkward pause. “...right. I suppose we had better go straight to the compound, where-”

“I want to see it.” Angelica froze. Buffy looked straight at her. “I want to see where he died.”

The woman swallowed, hard, then nodded once. “Very well.”

 

_It's a brand new world. We changed it. We took the power foisted on a rare few and shared it out to everyone. Not all who got it were nice people, of course. In the movies and comics, those kinds of people always get away, to cause evil again elsewhere. In the real world, where vamps and demons abound, that whole 'Me have power, me watch world burn now'-attitude usually gets you killed quicker than a Star Trek redshirt. Power means nothing without a good plan and good people on your side._

_I mean, I can mention half a dozen Slayers who got their dumb asses handed to them by the forces of darkness when they tried to muscle in on the established turfs. Most just got killed right away, but there's a few examples made that we scare the more self-absorbed ones wih when we introduce them to the job._

_Like this girl in Alaska, decided to use her newfound power to start abusing some poor guy who didn't invite her to the prom, turns out the guy's aunt was a witch. When we found her she was at the level of a five-year-old. Sixteen-year-old girl with the mind of a kindergartener. She's getting better, but still._

_Then there's that girl from LA, Danni? Dora? Something like that. We never did manage to help her all that much. But she does get the best psychiatric care Watcher money can buy. One day she might be able to talk to people normally again._

_Last, there was some pink-haired harpy I heard of who tried to move in on the mercenary scene. They still haven't found her legs._

_But we changed the world. And for the most part, it was for the better._

_For the most part._

 

There had been a village here. Right up until a gang of former child soldiers turned vampires had shown up, wiped everyone out and squatted in the buildings to strike at nearby communities.

“So when did he get involved?”

Angelica stared at one of the huts, burned to nothing but ashes and semi-molten remains of an old-fashioned stove. “He...he sent a small patrol to find out what was happening. They returned bloody and bruised from an ambush, told him what had happened and what the situation was, and he...”

Buffy nodded. “He went out on his own.”

“No!” The anger in the woman's voice made Buffy turn, a little surprised. “Didn't you read the, the report? He gathered five strike teams, set them each to prepare ambushes at the easiest main targets within half a night's travel from here, then coordinated from the base.”

Oh. Yeah, that made sense. She tried not to let her embarrassment show. “He, uh, he did-”

Angelica was glaring at her. “He was the most skilled, efficient Watcher I have _ever_ had the pleasure of working with. I don't know who you _think_ he was, but he...”

“Okay, okay! Sorry.” She sighed. “It's just, that's not who he used to be.”

The woman's glare softened a little. “People change, Ms Summers.”

“Yeah. I guess they do.” She looked around at the blackened charred remains of the village. “So what happened?”

Angelica crouched down by one of the heaps of soot. “A _second_ group of combatants entered the scenario.”

Buffy stared at the scene, then frowned. “Wait, that wasn't in the report _I_ read.”

The woman looked up, sharply. “Then perhaps you should read the report I sent _in_.”

 

_The fairytales tell you girls get their prince. I never got mine, and I never realized why until recently._

_I searched for him, of course. Found the archetype, the strong, tall, manly, dour and mysterious guy. That went nuclear right fast. Then I tried the smirking motorcycle rebel. Turns out, motorcycle rebels are mostly good at being asses. He got a soul, but by then, yeah, no._

_It never occurred to me until I was watching an old movie late one night, post Slayage, that I was never the princess. I was never the damsel in distress._

_I was the damn prince._

 

It didn't make sense. The report _she'd_ read was _more_ than incomplete, it was downright _censored._ She knew Giles wouldn't do that, not when a potential threat to the original three was hinted at, but Giles wasn't alone at the London office. Any of a _dozen_ men and women could have altered the text she and Giles had read.

But why? Why go after _him?_ Willow was much higher priority on the threat scale, and Buffy was the prime Slayer, figurehead of the new Council.

Not that he was incompetent, but... _he'd_ be the first to ask why they would come for _him_.

Okay. So the Slayer teams had taken out the vampire gang, and while that was happening, a second bunch of demons had shown up, and drove back Xander's personal guard of four Slayers just to kill _him?_

It didn't make _sense_.

Or why someone was trying to hide this from her.

She put the report down, pulled out her phone and called a pre-programmed number.

“...yeah, Giles? Hi. The report we got was doctored. No, I'm sure. I'm taking a photo with the phone, and sending it to y...well, ask Willow to help you with that. Seriously, you _have_ to get with the modern times. Anyway, I think it's fair to say that by now, whoever messed with the report has skedaddled, so check who's missing in the London offices and investigate on your end. Thanks. I'm...I'm not done here. No, tell Dawn I'll be back when I'm satisfied. Okay. Okay. No. Okay. Sure, I'll report in what I find out. See you guys in a few.”

Hanging up, her shoulders slumped and she took a ragged breath.

No, she was not gonna break down and cry. Not..not _yet_. She had to – for his sake, she had to find out what else happened.

Buffy turned to Angelica, who stood in the doorway looking worried. “I need to see his remains.”

The woman gasped, but nodded.

 

_It hurts when you figure out that you lived your life with the wrong expectations._

_So I sat there and looked at my life, and the first thing I realized was that I'd had a damsel in distress all along. I used to make fun of him for it. His dating history, his bad luck with women who always turned out to be demons or evil or just plain weird._

_In retrospect, it was kind of obvious._

_Heck, he even got ravished by the women, for the most part. His first time was with a girl who basically threw him on a bed, had her way with him and then threw him out. A great hero turned evil, the classic blackguard archetype. I went to college, I know terms like that._

_His second was with a girl who didn't take a hint, like, ever. The only time he was ever aggressive was when something else was in control of his actions. He didn't even take advantage when he had the opportunity to. That happened twice, even, once due to a spell mishap, the other time due to some magic beer. And he didn't._

_Heh. Magic beer. My life is so weird._

_So I looked at how I'd treated him, which was for the most part okay with some black marks of badness on the ledgers, but mostly I looked at my own feelings. And realized that the main reason I had never seen him that way before was because I had still pretty much been stuck in the old belief that all girls are princesses who needs a big, strong man to be their savior. When in fact **I'm** the big strong one in any relationship I'll ever have, unless I start dating trolls._

_Yeah, never gonna go there. Ick._

_And when I looked at him as a princess, metaphorically, I realized that while he may be a dork, he was actually kind of..._

_...let's just say the dreams that I had for weeks after that were very, um, detailed._

 

She didn't know what she'd been expecting. A pristine corpse she could stare at? His blank eyes staring back at her, like with her mother?

Instead there was a blackened skeleton on the table, twisted and hunched up in a foetal position.

God, how did it _come_ to this? Yeah, they'd fallen apart after Sunnydale. Buffy and Giles had gone into recruitment and organization overdrive, while Faith and her boytoy handled the Cleveland Hellmouth. Willow had taken Kennedy to South America, and he...

...he had barely talked to them for over six _months_ , and then vanished off the grid entirely. It wasn't until she returned from the Rome assignment and panicked in front of Giles that the old fart told her the truth, that _he_ had asked Giles for a foreign position and had gotten the Africa turf.

And he'd done good.

The school here was cloaked in magic and misdirection, only the Council even knew what _country_ it lay in, and from here he had gathered over a hundred Slayers from all over the continent.

Judging from the glares she'd gotten from the stunned, shellshocked Slayers walking the compound, they were all fiercely protective of him. Just like this Angelica woman.

Just exactly what _was_ his relation to her, anyway?

Anyway, that had worked out well right up until this. Which was a clusterhump of epic proportions. She had lost him twice, it seemed, first to the end of Sunnydale and now to freaking demons who ambushed during...

...wait.

Frowning at something she'd seen on the skeleton, Buffy turned to glance at Angelica. “These vampires your girls took out, you got the reports on their activities?”

“Yes, of course. Why?”

“Just a hunch. Oh, and did anyone get a good look at this second group of demons?”

The woman frowned. “Only Miranda, she was the last to see him alive.”

“Could I talk to her? I just want to know.” She looked at the skeleton once again, frowning. “Oh, and, uh, could you call Giles in England about his medical charts?”

“Certainly.” The woman who was too damn gorgeous for her own good marched off immediately, leaving Buffy with the blackened remains of a human being.

She looked closer. Huh.

 

_When I told Dawn, she laughed at me. Yeah. Not an ounce of pity. Basically, 'You finally got your head out of your ass?' She really got a potty mouth on her these days. Then she did her victory dance, and ran to call Willow._

_Turns out, they had a betting pool going._

_I know!_

_And not just Dawn and Wills, oh no. Faith, Robin, Giles, the Sunnydale veterans, freaking Andrew! Dawn won, and refused to share the spoils with me. She wore the shoes the betting money bought her for weeks after just to rub it in, too._

_Evil girl._

_So I asked Giles to prepare a ticket to Africa for me. I know, I know, it's not a country. Like I'm gonna tell you the location anyway, as if. Need-to-know basis, and none of you need to know._

_Only, that's when he told me the news._

_Xander Harris was dead._

_And that's when I cracked right down the center, because..._

_...because my heart was gone._

 

“I only got one look at them.” Miranda was skinny, blonde and barely seventeen, South African with the arrogance of a suburban teenager, speaking in a harsh, almost guttural dialect that was kinda hard to follow at times. “The leader was approximately seven feet tall, leather-like skin, no hair, big blue eyes and no nose. It wore clothes, though, a pinstripe suit.”

“Right. His minions?”

The girl shrugged. “Mostly humans or vampires out of gameface. A Brachen demon or two, but that's no indicator of anything.”

No, Brachen demons were much like minority humans, they usually kept their heads down and did whatever work they could get. Two of them working with this guy meant about as much as if it had been human mercs. “Okay. Thanks for your help, Miranda. Could you ask Angelica in here?”

“Yes, Ms Summers.”

It was hard not to feel old when they called her that. Her _mom_ had been _Ms_ Summers.

Angelica entered. Once again Buffy found that it was hard not to be jealous of her. Six foot tall, perfect ebony skin, big eyes and big...well, going by the tied-together blouse she wore she had a lot more in the whole chestal department than Buffy could ever have.

And he _worked_ with this woman? Every day? And didn't mention it in any of his reports?

“Ms Summers?”

“Call me Buffy. Please. And I need you to assemble the troops, because this is all wrong.”

The woman stiffened. “Oh?”

She smiled at Angelica. “Yeah. First off, he broke his arm a few years back, from a bad hit from a troll hammer. The troll was holding back, or he'd be dead, but still. The bones you got in there has never suffered a broken bone, _ever_. He had like a _dozen_ fractures. Second, the demon Miranda saw sounds a lot like Giacomo Prizzi, a Glorikhar demon who works for the Immortal in the Demon Underground. He's his _capo_ , so to speak. Right-hand man.”

The woman's cheeks were heating. “Are you saying-”

“He's _alive_. And when I get to the people who took him, they're gonna _wish_ for death.”

 

_I did mention he's my damsel in distress, right?_


	2. Pirates don't dance, well, actually they do...

**Disclaimers are in Chapter 1.**

-

-

 

“O, Nancy Dawson, hi-o!” The acoustics here were _terrible_. “Cheer'ly man!”

He scratched his thigh as best he could with his thoroughly tied up hands. Well, they weren't stupid. They hadn't left him tied to a chair – chairs broke – or near any kind of loose nails or tools or old saws. Kind of disappointing, really. Where was the challenge in just tying a captive _up_?

“She's got a notion hio-o!” Yeah, nobody would hold concerts in this basement. Or whatever it was. Smelled like earth. Earthy earth, that was. And...huh. Familiar smell. Real familiar smell. He grimaced, then felt nauseous.

_You're the one who sees everything, aren't you?_

A wine cellar. They put him in a goddamn _wine_ cellar. Sonuvabitches. Like he didn't feel terrible enough already.

Mary. Tuanga. Jacintha. Elspeth.

Were they still alive? Had they killed them? Maimed them? Crippled them? A juvenile part of him started making ridiculous blood oaths and threats that he knew he couldn't back up. Another part of him, the part that was talking a lot lately, just whispered _'Kill them all'_ in a way that was too seductive to ignore entirely.

Didn't used to be this way.

-

-

 

_Excelsior, true believers! This is your very own Stan 'The Man' Lee to bring you the latest, awesome story, this time about a boy who meets a girl who might be more special than he thinks! That's right! It's a little tale that we're gonna call..._

_Buffy the Vampire Slayer!_

_Or not._

_Maybe the whole comic book approach is too corny._

_I was always a bigger fan of the 70's kitchen sink realism soap-opera comics than the goofy 60's cheesefests, the 80's yuppie schtick or the grim'n'grumpy 90's garbage. I was eight when I read the issues when Peter Parker lost Gwen Stacy, and MJ for once dropped her party-girl facade and stayed in to give him the comfort of a friend instead of blatantly hitting on him. It was an old, worn bunch of comics that I found in a bargain bin, twenty-five cents for a bundle of ten random Marvel comics. Some poor guy's comic book collection sold off by his clueless parents, most likely._

_I always liked MJ better than Gwen. Gwen was too nice, too perfect, too, I dunno, bland. She was just there. Somehow she was supposed to be Spidey's great love of his life. Only she died, and when she died, MJ didn't go for the kill._

_MJ was the one with the shitty home life, like mine. Drunk and occasionally violent dad, weak mom, bad grades, everybody telling her she'd amount to nothing._

_Difference was, my mom never gathered up the courage to leave Tony. Oh, and I wasn't as pretty as MJ. And, uh, oh yeah, I'm not a girl. That's an important distinction._

-

-

 

The guy looked like he'd walked out of that big fancy mobster movie, the one set in Vegas. Joe Pesci getting his head crushed in a vise, Robert De Niro getting blown up. Very nice suit, navy blue, probably Italian. White carnation in a buttonhole on the lapel, white handkerchief neatly folded in the breast pocket. Grey slacks.

“Mr Harris...”

He stared at the guy, then shook his head. “Wow. Could you stuff cotton in your mouth and say 'You come into my house on the day my daughter is to be married'? Just once?”

“Quaint.” The demon mobster sneered. “I was told you had a mouth on you.”

“I was told you guys went out of style in the 80's. Good to see some people are still keeping up the clichés.” He cricked his neck and swallowed, leaving his mouth dry. “Seriously, I'm just babbling. Kind of scared out of my mind here.”

“We're not going to hurt you, Mr Harris. Far from it. We're just brokers. Businessmen. We have a vested interest in keeping you alive and unharmed.” Mobster guy smiled at him. Such a friendly smile. The kind that'd make a shark slam the breaks and hit reverse.

“Okay.” He looked around. “Why the wine cellar?”

Mobster demon smirked. “Our client requested it.”

“Oh.” That meant someone who knew them, or knew a lot _about_ them. More than most. He was pretty sure the only guys who knew about that night were dead. Caleb included. Someone who specifically wanted to be a douche.

“Now, it won't be forever. We have transportation coming, but it won't be here until tomorrow. I'm sure you can understand.” Mobster demon smiled his shark-scaring smile again.

“Sure. Places to go, people to mutilate for Satan, I get it.” He shuddered. He hadn't been joking about being scared out of his mind. He always made more bad jokes and babbled when he was scared. And more fuckups.

-

-

 

_Funny thing is, MJ isn't my favorite because I think she and Spidey belongs together. To be honest, the Spidey I grew up with was kind of a jerk. He'd string girls along for ages, agonizing about what to do, take them out on dates and ditch them at the first sign of a supervillain, then make bullshit excuses when he got back. And he didn't lack for hot girls throwing themselves at his whiny ass, either. I love the character, but man did he ever complain about being the most elegible bachelor on the planet. He made Tony Stark look like Quasimodo when it came to attracting the ladies, and yet he never committed to even one of them, not really._

_Brunettes, redheads, black girls, platinum blondes, he even had Flash Thompson's Vietnamese girlfriend flirt with him a couple times. You can officially say you should get over your high school bully when the dude's own girlfriend thinks you're a better catch._

_But the reason I liked MJ best wasn't because of some one-true-pair thing like Andrew talks about. No, I liked her best because she was me._

_I mean, when Spidey ditched Gwen all the time, she got a little pissed and asked questions. MJ was cool with it, and just went 'whatever'. For the longest time, she seemed weirdly okay with all his cockamamie excuses, until finally the reason was revealed. She knew he was Spidey. In fact, she'd known all along. When the short mini series came out about how MJ had known about Peter being Spidey since before they even met, it all made perfect sense._

_And like I said, she was me. I was her. I was the goofy guy making light of having a goddamn nightmare at home. I was the support-o-guy who was always there when I was really needed (as long as I was asked, and not caught up in my own woes) but pretended to be – well, not so much pretended as actually was – Mr Unreliable the rest of the time. I once went up against my best friend when she was about to end the world, and talked her down by simply being there for her. I have no powers. No skills other than expert drywalling. I'm a goofball dork. I'm not the hero of my own story._

_I am Mary-Jane Watson._

_Thing is, that's not where most people think a guy belongs._

-

-

 

“We faked your _death_ , Mr Harris. Nobody will be looking for you.” Demon mobster smiled. A flunky entered the room and handed him a chair, which the mobster stereotype pulled up and sat on, all casual-like. “None of your friends know you're still alive.”

“Yeah? Well...you suck.” He winced at the lousy repartee. “Why're you doing this?”

“I told you, we're bro-”

“No, I mean, why are you doing _this_. Now. Explaining your genius scheme to me. Why? What's the point?” He found the confused lack of understanding on his captor's face to be a little rewarding. A tiny speck of sunlight in the darkness.

“Beg pardon?”

He sighed. “You're _monologing_. Telling me how clever you are, bragging about how nobody will ever find me...what's the _point_? I mean, is that part of the deal, too?” A flicker of exasperation in the demon's face proved it. “It is, isn't it? Whoever hired you guys wants you to make me feel _miserable_ , too. That suggests a personal stake.”

The demon frowned, his fake smile vanishing. “You know nothing.”

“No, but I can figure it out. See, not many know about the vineyard. Has to be someone who was in Sunnydale. Few of those have a personal agenda against me and the others in the gang. Only _one_ of them would be _this_ petty.” He smiled. “Tell Amy I said hi.”

The demon stared at him in stunned disbelief for several seconds, then burst out laughing. Then he shook his head. “I can see our employer underestimated you quite a bit.”

“Yeah? Nice. Usually they _over_ estimate me.” Then he frowned. “How the hell would Amy have the cash to hire someone big like _you_? I mean, you're with the Immortal, right?”

The demon raised an immaculate not-quite-eyebrow. “She's one of the most highly-sought-after witches in the Western hemisphere. Do you have any idea the sheer amount of raw power your average witch from a Hellmouth can crank out? Your friend Rosenberg is the strongest we know of, but pretty much anyone with magical puissance who's lived near an active Hellmouth for some time become powerful. It's why they go there in the first place.”

The demon was lying. He was pretty sure of that. The over-explaining, the deflecting of the question... “Really.”

“Oh, yes. But none of that matters.” The demon mobster stood, picking the chair up in one hand and handing it over to his flunky. “You're a commodity, Mr Harris. Bought and sold. So please, no heroics.”

Heh. This guy had _no_ idea what he was dealing with if he thought Xander Harris was gonna try anything _heroic_.

-

-

 

_When you grow up as a guy in modern society, you grow up being told you're The Guy. You're the one who gets chosen, the one who gets the girl, you're the hero. Now, I never got that from home. _

_Mom called me a lot of things, but y'know that classic moment when you ask your parents if you can be an astronaut, and they smile warmly and say you can be whatever you want? When I asked that – I asked if I could be a fireman, because I liked the trucks – my mom got this... look on her face that I'll never forget. She hesitated, way too long, and then smiled and told me sure, I could be a fireman...the same way she did when she told me daddy was just a little tired, and the black eye was because she walked into a door._

_It's a horrible thing, realizing your mom doesn't believe you'll ever do anything good with yourself when you're five._

_Dad never lied. He'd hit me, he'd call me a waste of space, he'd say he never wanted me, he'd say I was a mistake, but he never lied. Never said anything he didn't believe. Sure, he was an alcoholic prick who beat his wife and kids and blamed them for everything wrong he'd caused in his own life, but he never lied about how he felt or what he thought. To himself, sure. To others? Never._

_When I was six, dad hired a clown for my birthday. The clown was a weird one, he kept walking up to all the unbaptized kids and asking them if they wanted to see real magic – fortunately he was so creepy nobody took him up on it – and by the time the cake was about to be served, I was crying out of fear because I'd seen that the clown had scaly skin under his make-up._

_Dad gave me a beating that day. And when he was gone, and left me sobbing into my pillow, it didn't occur to me until the next day that the envelope with birthday money I'd been given from my relatives was gone. Dad bought a lot of booze that weekend._

_So the point is that I had a bit of a conflict going from the very start. On the one hand, there was the media, TV, movies, music, all telling me I was gonna be a rock'n roll singer secret agent Jedi who dated Jesse's girl (boy did me and Jesse have fun about that stupid song later) and killed Hans Grüber with a pithy one-liner._

_On the other hand was my family, telling me I would never amount to anything, that I was worthless and nobody wanted me, a family where my dad stole all my money for alcohol unless I hid it from him, and a mom who always made excuses for him and thought I was going to end up like him._

_When I met Jesse McNally, I finally met someone who thought I was cool._

-

-

 

Okay. Work with what you got. He wasn't gonna try anything heroic, but if he could mess with these guys plans? Always a fun thing, because pissing demons off always made them make mistakes.

So what did he have? Well, he was tied up with rope, not metal or zip-tie. Metal always needed either lockpicks or heavy tools, zip-ties hurt like the dickens and required sharp objects to get rid of. Rope? He could work with rope. The ropes were tight, that was the bad thing. The good thing was that he'd dislocated his thumb in a work accident years ago, and, well...

He winced and whimpered as the thumb popped out of its joint. God, he was gonna have to wear a support glove for _weeks_ after.

If he lived.

Once the thumb was out of the way, removing the ropes was easy. Putting the thumb back without screaming? Ehhh...not so much. He sobbed out loud as he managed to thump the hand hard enough against the earthen floor to put the damn thing in its place, and then rolled around for several long moments just biting his lip and cheek hard to keep from yelling or crying out.

Gah. The Lethal Weapon movies were _so_ full of lies.

Eventually the pain subsided enough for him to get up and check his surroundings. Now that he was free, even an old abandoned wine cellar was a font of opportunity, with all sorts of potential improvises weapons. Not bottles. Bottles were hard to break right without cutting yourself, and too fragile in a fight against demons. Besides, no bottles around.

Now, two things were in his favor. One, the door to the wine cellar was a sturdy armored door the likes of which would make your average bomb shelter look fragile, and the walls were solid concrete. This might sound bad, but it wasn't. Not if you weren't planning on escaping.

-

-

 

_The day I lost my best friend was also the day I realized that us guys? Not so important as we think. Turns out, there really are superheroes out there. And they're all women._

_At the time, there was just the one, but there came others. The uptight hardass who was too inflexible. The morally ambivalent rogue who turned on us. And then a whole bunch of'em all at once. Not to mention the mistresses of magic mojo...sorry, that's my inner Stan Lee rearing his meerkat-like head again. He does that a lot when I'm tired and confused._

_I'm not gonna lie, I wasn't as fully behind that decision as I acted. Not because I'm scared of women with power, I mean, I've fought alongside a whole bunch of powerful women for the past ten years or so, if I had an issue with powerful women I'd have shown it long ago. No, my problem was this; for all the time I'd known her, Buffy hated having been drafted into the fight._

_And now she was doing it herself to thousands of girls around the world._

_So, yeah, I had my misgivings._

_As it turns out, it wasn't as bad it could have been. For one thing, Slayer potentials are seemingly picked on potential worthiness, meaning that just about all of them are or are trying to be good people. Sure, flukes happen, but power can corrupt very easily if you just get handed it on a platter. That Nicole, Simone, Manon or whatever her name was, she was one of the freaky outliers. And she also got herself killed quickly, because approaching a demon lord thinking you can take him down with guns and take over his position just because you now have Slayer powers is somewhere along the lines of wearing a copper wire hat near a Tesla-coil. Not conductive to continued health._

_'Conductive'. Heh. Funny._

_I never told Buffy the whole story about that girl. She was busy 'investigating' the Immortal in Rome (that is, partying while snooping around the Immortal), and being told one of the Slayers had gone for Evil Overlord the moment she got power wasn't really something she needed to hear at the time. Not a secret, just...not pertinent information. We told her later._

_As it was, me and Faith and Robin cleaned up after the whole mess best we could, and got Nisimomanonwhatever a decent burial. Least we could do, even if we never found all the parts, just the head, most of the torso and the arms._

_I'm just being dismissive, by the by. Her name was Simone Doffler. She was this quiet little mousy girl until she got Slayer powers, at which point she went buggo and decided to take over the world, or at least a small corner of it. Plus, she stole her whole look from Tank Girl, who was an awesome comic book character._

_In the New Slayer & Watcher's Council, we don't frown on wanting to take over the world. It's how and why that's the issue._

_So, yeah. Happily, I was mostly wrong about the dangers. For the most part, the Slayer essence or whatever you wanna call it knows what it's doing. Simone could have been a great hero and Slayer, and instead thought she could go Lexa Luthor on us, not pausing to think that the position might already be taken by way worse critters._

_And in any case, she didn't believe in superheroes. That was her first mistake._

_Me? I've believed in superheroes since I was a kid. As I got older, I found out they were real and didn't need belief, and also found that like most good comic book characters, they're still human underneath the super-strength and uploaded Kung Fu skills._

_Never put your heroes on a pedestal, by the by. It makes you look like a tool, and makes the heroes uncomfortable._

_Jesse was, as mentioned, The Guy in my eyes. He was cool, a bit of a womanizer – in retrospect, I think Cordelia saw the darkness in him better than anyone else, even if she was too shallow to recognize it at the time – and he was everything I wasn't. He was a darn good skater. He got decent grades. He grew facial hair before me (trust me, to an adolescent boy, that's important). He wore nicer clothes, and his parents were supportive and kind._

_Part of me envied that. But hated him? Never. How could you hate The Guy who saved you from Larry, who always distracted Cordelia with blatant passes whenever she got into her pick-on-Willow-and-Xander routines, who always backed up your feeble excuses about missed homework so you wouldn't have to admit the reason you didn't do the English essay was because your dad threw the book in the garbage when he was drunk?_

_And then I killed him._

-

-

 

The thumping ceased. _“Mr Harris, this is pointless. You can't escape.”_

He leaned against a pillar, sighing. “Says you.”

Another bunch of heavy thumps, resulting in nothing. The barrels and shelves that he'd tipped over and wedged against the door were firmly in place, keeping it from budging. Even if the door itself were to come loose from the concrete it was set in, it wouldn't do any good. It was stuck as a stuck _stuck_ thing on Stuck-Day in Stuckingsville, Stuckington County in the state of Stuckonia, United States of Stuck.

“ _...Mr Harris, we will get in. Sooner or later.”_

He grinned. “You said it yourself, Baldy. You were keeping me here until transportation arrived. Which means it was on a deadline. I'm gonna enjoy watching you explain to whoever hired you that you couldn't deliver because of a one-eyed carpenter with a dislocated thumb.”

There was a pause. _“Ms Madison didn't specify a time, actually.”_ The voice was starting to sound exasperated. Oh, good, he was pissing off the demons who only wanted him alive because of money. _  
_

“Yeah, and if I believed Amy Madison, who was a rat for two frickin' _years_ because she sucked so bad at magic, had the cash and magic mojo to hire you guys, I'd also be the proud owner of my very own bridge in San Francisco. Contrary to what my dad used to say, I'm not a _total_ idiot.” He looked up. Airhole vents. If they wanted him dead, they just had to cover them up. But knock him out and the door stayed stuck.

“ _Mr Harris, we will get in. And if you make us miss the delivery, we will not be gentle.”_

“So?”

Another long pause. Then, _“So be it.”_

Hm. That did not bode well. Time to use his _real_ ace in the hole.

-

-

 


	3. Chicken nuggets can be quite deadly...

_I hate leadership. No, really. Contrary to popular belief, I never wanted the president's wig, or whatever they make presidents wear. Kings have crowns, judges have robes, presidents have wigs, right? Anyway, I never wanted that crap. Responsibility? No thank you._

_So how come I kept getting dragged into it? I was a cheerleader, then one day I realize the head cheer we had was a complete moron who was gonna get us hurt, I complain loudly, all of a sudden I've been voted head cheer. Bam. Responsibility, right between the eyes. Like learning to balance three people on top of you without breaking something vital wasn't hard enough._

_To be honest, the Slayer thing felt like a relief at times. I mean, they gave you a stake, pointed you at the Klingon-faced ones – please never tell Angel or Spike I think they kinda look like Klingons, they'd never forgive me – and told you 'Go nuts, young lady'. My kind of gig, all the anger management, none of the big kahuna duties._

_...and then one day I realized I was the general of the Scooby Army, all six of us. The exact six kept changing, from laidback werewolves to apprentice witches to chipped or souled vampires, but the number stayed roughly six-seven. Until we changed the game, and I found myself general of an actual army._

_So there I am, with all the responsibilities I never wanted, and the one guy who always had my back goes 'Hey, y'know what, I need some time away' and runs off to Africa._

_I know what some of you are thinking, 'Whaddya mean he had your back, he totally said mean things to you that one time or the other, and also lied, like, once!'..._

_...and I understand why you think like that._

 

_You're idiots._

 

_See, friends, real friends, aren't sheep. They don't answer your every demand with 'baa' and rush to carry out your every whim no matter what. I'm human, I can mess up like nobody can, even bigger sometimes considering what the stakes are._

_Heh. 'Stakes'. I slay me._

_And another zinger, there! I gotta start saving these up again._

_Anyway, sometimes, having someone's back means standing up to you and telling you you're about to walk off a cliff. Or lying about something so you don't fret about it while driving on a Greek mountain road with the headlights turned off. And he did that a lot. And I screwed up a lot._

_It went both ways, of course. Sometimes he messed up, and I told him so. Sometimes he had questionable taste in women right when I could have really used a ~~rebound guy that could have become more serious~~ friend, but hey, I kept somewhat quiet then. I only picked on Cordelia a little bit. And Anya. Um.  
_

_...okay, kind of a lot._

_My point being, pobody's nerfect. Not him, not me. He told me when I was being a jackass, I did him the same favor. That's what friends are, people. If your idea of friends is someone who goes 'Yes, Oh Genius One!' to every moronic idea you might have, you might want to tell them your life just got messed up bad, and then you'll see how many of them stick around._

_So, yeah. He had my back, I had his. And he also has a very haveable backside, the kind that Speedos were made for. Yeah, I went there. Objectifying the male physique is my second-favorite pastime, and none of your beeswax what my first favorite is._

_Sorry, I digress. My point is, really, that he was one of my most reliable, trustworthy friends in the world. But when I became an actual general, he skedaddled._

 

_I admit, I felt betrayed. There I was, doing paperwork and fighting demons and trying to teach a thousand (and still growing in numbers) young women that just because they were special didn't mean the normal people were expendable peons. Believe me, Willow's ex-girlfriend was really trying my patience in that last regard. Girl had an ego the size of a small galaxy even before the superpowers. There I was, all the weight of the world on my petite shoulders, and the guy who used to prop me up had run off to Africa of all places._

_Now I understand why._

 

_Spike said something to me before he...well, he didn't die, I know that now, but before he got vaporized. I told him I loved him, because it felt like the thing to do. He saw right through it, as usual, and told me no, I didn't, but it was nice of me to say so. And to be honest? He was dead on. Undead on? Whatever. I didn't love him. Not that way. I never really did. I never loved him like I loved Angel, or Pike, or Riley, even though Riley was right about me not loving him completely. I guess I was scared he was gonna leave me, and ironically that's what drove him off._

_I liked Spike. There's a difference between 'love' and 'like', though it might not seem so to people with tiny brains._

_The Spike without a soul I liked because he said the right things at the right time (if you think I haven't realized he was lying about thinking I was Buffybot that time when Glory tortured him, you underestimate my intelligence), even if I never believed any of it, and he did help me out of my weird depression by giving me an out for my building anger and resentment._

_Unfortunately, none of those are what you build a healthy relationship on, and it is so not a good growing ground for love. If your first thought about a guy is that you would like to tear his ears off and feed them to him unironically, you're not in love. Trust me on that one. The line between love and hate isn't that thin._

_When he got his soul, Spike filled another role, that of the fixer-upper project. He was...a safe Angel-substitute, I guess. I could get close to him without worrying about perfect happiness, his or mine. His because hey, he couldn't lose his soul that way. Mine because he could never give me that._

 

_I count the number of men capable of making me perfectly happy on one hand, and Spike isn't one of them. Perfectly miserable, yes, but in spite of what really awfully bad 'romance'-novels tell you, misery is about as healthy a place to start a relationship at as the bubonic plague or Ebola. If a guy locks the door on you in a situation where you can't call for help, and tells you he wants to hit you, that has nothing to do with bondage, that's just him being a creepy rapist abuser._

_Trust me, I've done a little healthy bondage. It's all about trust, not some rich sociopath of a freak telling you what to think or feel. Hate those books, can you tell?_

_I never trusted Spike, not in matters of the heart. In a fight, always. In an argument, barely, because the guy fights dirty. In love? Never. Trusting Spike with your heart is a good way to make him self-implode. Me? I'll live. Him, not so much._

_See, Spike...he gets too into it. He devotes himself to becoming what you want, erasing himself until finally his true core self can't take it any more and rebels. As much as he's a good guy now, he's still a vicious psychotic demon held barely in check by a soul. And before that he was a vicious psychotic demon held barely in check with Pavlovian punishment mechanisms._

_What? I did say I was a psych student._

_So when I told him I loved him, I wanted to feel it, but he knew I didn't, and he told me so. When he got vaped, he finally admitted to himself that he wasn't a hero written by Lord Byron. I don't know much about if that stuck, we don't meet very often – not at all, to be honest, unless you count him and Angel stalking my body-double in Rome – but it definitely struck a chord with me._

_But Xander..._

_...when Anya died, they were close to getting back together again, in a good way. He wasn't as scared of commitment or himself, and she had found her own humanity without needing his prompting. And as weird and dysfunctional as their relationship was, he truly loved her, and she loved him. You don't make peace the way they did if you don't love someone with all your heart._

_We both left Sunnydale with a death on our minds, but mine was a release of what I thought were my obligations, his was a devastating theft of what could have been true happiness._

_I get that part now, is my point._

_He left for Africa not because he didn't want to be our friend anymore, but because we all reminded him of her. At the time, I felt betrayed, and yes, got a little upset and may have called him bad names in private where only Dawn and Mr Gordo could hear, but in truth I know now that he left us because if he hadn't, he might have said or done something he could never take back. _

_So when I realized the one guy I couldn't stop thinking about was the one guy I'd told myself wasn't a real prospect, you might understand why I got seriously peeved when I first thought he was dead and then understood he'd been kidnapped._

_I, uh, might have gone with a little overkill._

_A little bit._

-

-

 

“Satellite feeds show this compound having heightened heat signatures, suggesting power generators, lots of people and lots of stuff happening. Since the bungalow and barn are supposed to be completely abandoned since six years ago, the newly repaired roof and the big humvee parked outside the barn are kind of a clue.” She paused, and nodded to an upraised hand. “Yeah?”

“Um, Miz Sahmehz, how deed you get zeese pictyoores?” ...okay, maybe her inner translator was exaggerating that French accent somewhat. How come nobody ever told her people spoke Spanish, Italian and freaking _French_ in Africa!

“That's on a need to know basis. Let's just say I have friends who can give me access to satellites even the Russians and Chinese don't know exist.” She picked up the collapsible pointer, extended it, and poked the projected picture. “The main bungalow is our target. It has the most heat signatures, and what looks like a guard rotation near this staircase leading underground. We don't have radar surface mapping, or we'd know for sure, but we're fairly sure that's where they're keeping Xa...Mr Harris. Blueprints suggest a basement with a bomb shelter there, built during World War 2.

“Team Beta and Gamma will strike here and here,” she tapped the locations on the satellite picture, “taking out their perimeter guards and sabotaging the vehicles, both the humvee and whatever they have in the barn, imaging suggests a typical military truck. I'm saying slash the tires, break as much as possible in the engines, and if necessary use the explosives provided. That's a last measure, though, we need to be losing and in retreat for that to be an option.”

The image shifted to a zoomed in image. “Delta team stages a distraction here. Remember, you're supposed to make noise and call them out, so use your flashbangs. Then it's crossbows and falling back, we want them to be drawn _away_ from the bungalow with no time to stop and think, so no crazy chances.”

Angelica raised a hand, though in her case it was more sardonic-like. “And would I be correct in assuming you're part of team Alpha?”

Buffy didn't bat an eye. “Damn skippy I am. I'm not just the Slayer here with the most field and combat experience, I also know first-hand how pear-shaped a plan like this can go. That's why I'll be part of team Alpha. Not the _leader_ , though, because I don't know the terrain here well enough to make the right calls on approach.”

Yup, they'd thought she was gonna be in charge of that bit. Heh. If Xander and multiple mass outings against overwhelming odds had taught her anything, it was that planning was one thing, reality another. She needed to be able to think on her feet, but also didn't want to constantly worry about putting her foot in a scorpion's nest or something.

Literally. She _hated_ scorpions. _So_ gross.

“ _However_...inside the compound I am ultimately in command, and my word goes. I will ask advice if needed, but my orders are absolute. Now, mortar teams, you got your gear in order?”

“Yes, ma'am. Um, isn't shelling the place with mortars sort of...too much?”

 

Buffy gave her a feral grin in return. “First, those mortars are mostly flash and bang, with very little actual oomph. Second, the Deluge grenades you'll be using for the second stage have been tried and tested, they're extremely efficient in conditions like these with little wind and enough evening heat to keep the moisture in the air for a long time. Third, I _like_ making the bad guys go boom.” She winked at the girl who had asked, causing her to blush. “What? I got a rocketlauncher for my seventeenth birthday. It was the best present ever.”

Angelica raised her hand again. “How can you be so sure he's alive? We've tried half a dozen seeker spells since this morning, with no results.”

Buffy shrugged. “Lucky for us, I have something _better_ than seeker spells. I have a Willow. She's informed me in no small words that not only is he alive, he's uninjured. So far. Unfortunately the same wards keeping you from finding him are also keeping her from being anything but long-distance magical artillery, and, uh, that's a last resort. Like, _the_ last resort. When Willow is in artillery mode, the safest place to be is somewhere on the next _continent._ Her aim, not so good.”

She didn't mention that Willow had _not_ reacted well when she found out the truth. Or that Buffy had spent over an hour trying to talk the witch down from teleporting over and going apocalyptic on their asses. Those _eyes._..

Buffy shuddered. “All right, dismissed. We move out in half an hour. Be ready.”

 

She watched the Slayers get up without a word, some of them talking quietly but professionally, with little of the gossiping she often found in Cleveland or London. Maybe it was the way the Council had been forced to negotiate with twenty different governments – some of which were in the same countries – just to be able to sneak in and hide their base here while they thought the base was in Jo-burg. When most of the militias, warlords and general scumbags of the continent hated the very idea of women not being sex slaves or worse, treading carefully and always being a pro meant the difference between disaster and continuing to exist.

How many 'natural disasters' had been caused by apocalypses unchecked? How many had died due to Slayers not being available in some parts of the world thanks to local demagogues and hatemongers and warlords? Those earthquakes in nations like China, had they all been natural, or were some of them because the Chinese government still wouldn't let the Council onto their territory, over a century after the last Chinese Slayer died? The rumors about North Korea being run entirely by vampires because the communist regime had _hanged_ the one girl that had become a Slayer there forty years ago, were they true?

Giles had suggested they not ask, but that had proved impractical. Even so, this base of theirs...if the location and existence became known to certain people, there'd be a bloody massacre here right quick.

It helped to be able to ask an ex-boyfriend to ask his immediate boss in the Department of Defense to rattle a few sabers now and then. How Riley got a job as secretary to the Minister of Defense was a puzzler, though. She suspected nepotism, Sam was the MoD's third cousin, after all...

Still, they were Slayers. Warriors of humanity. Guardians against all the boogedymen, satanic skanks and hobbledygobbledys out there.

She smiled softly after the last one left the room. “Say hello to my little friends...”

-

-

 

_I keep mentioning I used to go to college. I did, I really did. Finished up my classes long-distance when I had the time and money. And I studied psychology._

_For a long time, my experiences with the subject were soured on it by my then-teacher who'd turned out to be a selfish, murderous Frankenstein-wannabe. I mean, you think she's trying to teach you something, turns out you were just her cover story while she built abominations in the basement._

_But after Spike's little farewell to me, I got to thinking, and thinking got to more thinking, and when Xander left and I got angry even though I so often claimed to want to get him out of the immediate fight and into relative safety, I had a little change of heart._

_It wasn't that complicated, really. Math and me are good if somewhat distant friends, I'm decent at French and can ask for the nearest vampire bar in Spanish, history was never as boring to me as it was to most other girls (cough Cordeliacough), and I did okay in both chem and biology. English...uh, oh, hey, that's a nice outfit, really brings out your change of subject! My point being that other than English, I wasn't a moron, though I was no genius either. I did okay. Not straight A's, but enough to get into decent colleges and stuff. Also, I test well._

_People, though..._

_...people confused me. From Angel and his brooding refusal to deal with his own guilt to Willow's overcompensating for absent parental love to Xander and his horrifying relatives and family, I never really got the motivations of others. Not for lack of trying, I just never had a good frame of reference._

_So I missed the clues in the common bitterness in Xander's voice._

_I missed all the clues in Willow's desperate clingyness and obsessive-compulsive need to prove herself._

_I missed every single neon-sign of a clue to Angel's narcissistic personality and his tendency to think with his fists, and I seriously missed Spike's desperate Oedipus-complex need for mother figures to replace the one he killed long ago. Drusilla, me...whatever poor sap he's got these days..._

_Heck, I missed the clues to **my own** post-traumatic stress until I started going to a shrink in the know a while back._

 

_Psychology was a way to start making sense of the sense-not-makeable. I mean, a whole field of study dedicated to figuring out what makes people tick? Sign me up! Willow seemed to think I only took it because she was in it, but truth is, I was interested, and even got some validation when Walsh praised my work backhandedly while insulting my existence._

_...seriously, that woman had an inflated sense of herself, and a total lack of understanding of other people's problems. But then, she built an adoptive son out of Radio Shack parts, demon kibble and human corpses, so hey. Her being a sociopath is sort of obvious in hindsight._

_When I took psychology back up, I remembered how much fun it was. Also, the teacher didn't think me having to take occasional breaks from my studies to save the world was 'teen issues'. It helped that I'd saved his life from vampires a few months earlier. And you know, a teacher who gets a heads-up on big badness coming can be a friendly teacher, just saying._

_The thing about studying psychology is that you get a little...perceptive. And yeah, I spent a month doing the self-absorbed 'analyze-everyone'-thing until Dawn took me to school by pointing out every flaw of mine in a very dry, snarky, smirky list._

_...she listed that I'm 'sensitive about my height' twice._

_Yeah._

_But even if that's an obnoxious habit, there's still truth in there. Sure, one should probably start by analyzing oneself first, as I learned (sorry Dawnie), but...if it's there, it's there. People do stupid crap for reasons they never once thought about all the time._

_Like, take me. My dad cheats on my mom and ditches us. My first boyfriend (hi Trey!) cheated on me with my best friend. My first real boyfriend ran the moment he believed he'd get in my way. And then Angel showed up, and he was my dad and Pike all rolled up into one. Emotionally distant, snarky, aloof._

_It wasn't until my little 'I'm not the princess'-epiphany that I realized every guy I'd ever been involved with was the same. Uh...not counting that Parker guy, he was just an asshole. Anyway, as it turns out being drawn to the night isn't a good thing for your mental health._

_And I'm tired of the night._

-

-

 

It was like watching a well-oiled...no, it _was_ a well-oiled machine coming together. Once again she found her respect for Xander rising another notch. All these girls had been taken from all walks of life across the continent, and now they worked together, in pairs, in threes and in fours, deferring to whoever was in command of the group automatically until anything stupid was suggested.

If there was one thing she'd learned since Sunnydale went boom fell down, it was that a real leader delegated responsibility, trusted their chosen lieutenants to not be morons, and made other people give them all the good ideas on a silver platter. It wasn't a matter of charging into battle head first, it was making decisions based on recon and common sense.

Also, coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

Buffy Anne Summers stood back and watched as over sixty-five Slayers quickly moved into position around a compound full of vampires, demons and mercenaries.

She sighed, then raised a hand to her headset. “Mother Hen to all Nuggets, mission is go, I repeat, mission is go.”

As much as she loved fake military lingo, today it felt bitter. People would die today.

Hopefully it would all be on the _other_ side.

-

-

 


End file.
